I am really curious as to why Google would set-up and classifieds listing service like Google Base? And what is really interesting is that it is for FREE?

Here are a couple of strategies ideas as to why they might be doing it?

Strategy 1: Get as much content as possible, desimate sites like eBay and Career Builder and then once they have all but disaapeared start charging the user and advertiser for placing the content on Google Base. Sound farmiliar? Well it should, it is exactly what they did with Google Search.

Strategy 2: Get as much content as possible and keep it FREE, but use it to fuel their other products like AdSense and AdWords. This increases their revenue dramatically. But, it also reuces revenue from their current single source of revenue "ADVERTISERS". You see the bigger Google Base becomes the harder it will be for the avergae person to get a decent listing priority. So chances are you will pay for services like AdSense or Adwords to get your listing more exposure. This means More Money and More greed.

Strategy 3: Maybe Google simply doesn't know what they are going to do. May be it is not to dissimilar to Froogle which has been a major flop world wide. Maybe they just do things becuase they have the money and the time and let's face it Brand on the web is stronger than functioanllity and usability – sometimes.

Strategy 4: Maybe Google Base is nothing more than a way to increase content on the Google Search core product. Problem is that Google Search is powered by link popularity and Google Base is by Meta Search. They simly are incompatible, unless there is something I don't know?

Summary: It is definetly to early to tell what Google have planned. There are a range fo things that can occur and theya ll point to Googleing the world. At the endof the day I remain suspicous in that : THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS FREE LUNCH.

I think its 4. The stuff on google base is HIGHLY regulatable, HIGHLY indexable. I think this is a way for people to get their content into google and circumvent the whole web page part. its an extension of their mission to organize the world's information.

I dont know if you've read anything on the semantic web. Well basically the idea behind it for Google would be to use some sort of NLP (Natural Language Processing) AI to actually generate meaning behind the info on web pages.

I think that Google Base attempts to side step the whole AI part of it and tries to get humans to do what they are good at. By filling in concrete boxes Google can allow their searches to be much more relevant. If their searches are relevant they can make their context sensitive ads more relevant and thus gain a greater amount of click throughs.

I'm sure you've seen how Amazon has dealt with picture recognition. By getting people to do the actual filtering the end result will be that the pictures will be much more relevant than getting any non-human to do it. Google could be going for a similar approach and trying to organise all the info that they find hard to crawl meaningfully (jobs, recipes, selling stuff) and get humans to enter in fresh data as and when it updates.

Linking it to an RSS feed would make the whole process even easier since XML often gives the necessary info if the tags are meaningful.

My conspiracy theory is:

Google Base is a big honeypot for spammers. Get them to upload tons o spam, mark down who they are and demote the rest of their sites in the main index.

Maybe that wasn't the original intent, but it may be the best possible result at this point.

Since Google is encouraging publishers to upload their information to Google Base for inclusing in Froogle [1], I'm going to guess a mix of #2 and #4.

[1] http://www.google.com/sellonfroogle/

Is Froogle really that bad? I use it to at least gauge prices and get seller ratings...

Noticed something when looking at the default item types:

Course schedules <-> Google University search http://www.google.com/options/universities.html
Events and activities <-> ? Google Calendar
Jobs <-> ?
News and Articles <-> Google News
People profiles <-> ?
Products <-> Froogle
Recipes <-> ? probably just a demonstration of GB capability
Reference articles <-> Scholar or Web
Reviews <-> Froogle, Movie search, Book search, ? Web results......
Services <-> ?
Vehicles <-> Froogle
Wanted ads <-> ?

Its the ? that make me curious. This could be like a forecaster for future google services, particularly the events and such and the people profiles...

Hunter. Everything is relative. Compared to competing online stores Froogle has a lot of work to do to gain momentum and traffic. I believe you can only get so far with brand, after that it has to be user experience. I don't believe froogle is anywhere near the other online stores in terms of User Experience.